MBR_Issue_27 -January 2017 low res

Malta Business Review
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Malta Business Review
Why Russia
Is Using the
Internet to
Undermine
Western
Democracy
Powerful Russians were terrified by the
internet in 2011. Now they have made
sure we are, too.
By Maria Farrell
At a recent international meeting on
internet freedom and democracy,
one of the chairs made an unusual
request: He asked contributors to share
only research results, not anecdotes. I was
puzzled—why did this need to be said?
The couple of hundred attendees were
policy wonks and government ministers.
Politicians’ talking points and newspaper
editorials might base their calls to action
on horror stories, but the professionals
look for the data, right?
Half an hour later, a panel opened up to
the audience for questions, and then I
understood. A woman from an “official”
Russian nongovernmental organization
started to speak. Though her English was
excellent, her statement-as-a-question
was pretty incoherent. We can’t have
unfettered internet freedom, she said,
because just a few months ago, a boy in
central Russia got hooked on an online
game. When his parents cut off his access,
he tried to kill them. I think she said one
of them survived. It was all a bit emotional
and confusing. But her point was as clear
as it seemed ridiculous: The state must
control the internet to stop boys in central
Russia from stabbing their parents with
kitchen knives.
Now, I live in the United Kingdom, where
the state does more surveillance than any
other functioning democracy and requires
extra-legal and untransparent censorship by
internet service providers (because “Won’t
somebody think of the children?”). But even
to me, this statement—at an international
meeting, no less—sounded borderline
unhinged. I wasn’t the only one. Around the
room, people smirked as they fiddled with
their interpretation headsets. A few raised
eyebrows and exchanged knowing smiles.
Chatting to a European diplomat afterward, I
asked what had just happened. “Oh, it’s just
what they do now,” he said. He had recently
worked at the U.N. in New York and observed
Russia’s new M.O.: tell scary stories and
wreck the chance of a reasonable discussion.
Trolling, basically. Gesturing around at the
room of people mostly from Europe and
countries on Europe’s periphery, he said,
“They don’t want this kind of thing to work.”
By “this kind of thing,” he meant the
multistakeholder internet governance
model, which brings together governments,
business people, civil society, activists, and
internet engineers. Russia’s discomfort with
it is well-known. Along with China, Saudi
Arabia, and Iran, Russia has long lobbied at
the U.N.’s International Telecommunication
Union to keep decision-making to
governments.
But as I wrote a couple of weeks ago, U.S.
foreign policy on the internet hasn’t played
so well abroad, either. Internet Freedom
can sound like just another way to lock
in U.S. tech firms’ first-mover advantage
and de facto monopolies. American “soft
power” seems anything but benign to
leaders of autocracies. To them, the muchtouted
ability of tech giants like Twitter and
Facebook to facilitate revolutions looks like
deliberate sedition by a foreign power.
Russia’s leaders already see Western
conspiracy everywhere: the Orange
Revolution, the Arab Spring, the entire
internet. All of these play out in Moscow
as plots by the U.S. and its allies to ensure
the world order protects only Western
values and therefore Western interests.
And we play right into their hands, saying
the internet is a samizdat—the famously
hand-copied literature of opposition to
Soviet rule—and claiming the Che Guevara
of the 21st-century is a network. (And rather
ahistorically, too, given the United States’
violent antipathy to Guevara’s aims.)
Does the internet drive people-powered
revolutions? Maybe. It’s complicated. But
2011 began with the Arab Spring chasing out
the rulers of Tunisia and Egypt, and ended
with Moscow’s middle classes taking to
the streets in Facebook-organized protests
against electoral corruption. Facebook did
more than just make it easier to organize;
in a year of popular revolution, it let some
Russians feel they were part of something
bigger, that they had a chance. It was a
profound shock to Putin’s government. To
Putin’s ex-KGB mindset, there is no such
thing as spontaneous, popular protest. In
his world, power is vertical. Someone is
always pulling the strings. So the Russian
state married its existential pessimism to the
West’s internet cheerleading. The internet
had to be brought under control.
The Red Web, by Andrei Soldatov and
Irina Borogan, shows that before 2012,
Russian internet censorship was surprisingly
decentralized and inconsistent. It took the
shock of the short-lived middle class revolt
for Russia to really go on the offensive.
Opposition websites were hit with powerful
and coordinated distributed denial of service
attacks, trolling, and disinformation. Deluged
with pro-government propaganda, local
news platforms basically gave up trying to
separate fact from political fiction. The sheer
volume of fake news, plus its sophistication,
meant algorithms could no longer tell the
difference. (To be fair, humans—even those
in democracies—have trouble sorting fake
news from real, too.)
To Putin’s ex-KGB mindset,
there is no such thing as
spontaneous, popular protest
In 2012, new censorship measures were
brought in, using technologies that
indiscriminately block addresses and
inspect each packet of data. The official
rationale? “To protect the children.” Data
localization rules were also introduced,
requiring data about Russian citizens to
be stored on servers physically located in
Russia. The official rationale? To protect
Russians against American surveillance,
post-Snowden. The internet in Russia
was starting to come under control, but
for a state that believed it was facing an
existential threat, it wasn’t enough.
Russia turned its attention abroad. At
a 2012 U.N. meeting to create binding
international telecommunications rules,
Russia and Iran lobbied hard to increase
the role of states in internet governance. A
last-minute procedural U-turn caused most
Western countries to walk out. The chance
for global agreement was dead. While the
authoritarian states failed in their highprofile
U.N. efforts, they continue to make
steady progress in standardization study
groups where real work gets done. But it
still wasn’t enough.
When Russia finally emerged from internal
chaos, it was eager to take its place in the
international order.
The Russian state lacks the discipline
and capacity of the Chinese state. It is
too insecure to think long-term, as the
Communist Party of China does. Nor does
Russia offer a lucrative enough market to set
its own terms of engagement with foreign
firms. So Russia can’t assume into itself the
parts of the internet it wants (economic
growth) and isolate and expel the parts it
rejects (accelerated political change). But the
internet, with its politically and economically
disruptive power, remains both a symbol and
a channel of Western values and interests.
A purely defensive Russian response was
never going to be enough.
So Russia did the only thing it could: It
took the West’s proudest, strongest, most
transformational tool and helped to turn
it against us. Internet jiujitsu, in the form
of information war (what we used to call
propaganda) and cyberwar (plain old
hacking and sabotage), turned the energy of
the networks against their creators.
Russia almost certainly hacked the
computers of U.S. election officials and
the Democratic National Committee, and
funneled its damning findings through
willing stooges. This is not a fringe view. We
still don’t know whether the U.S. presidentelect
shares more with Vladimir Putin than
just an onanistic cult of toxic masculinity.
Links between the U.S. right and the Kremlin
are murky, though I expect more information
will emerge. But even if we find proof,
millions of Americans will simply refuse to
believe it. Homegrown propaganda sites will
amplify and disseminate disinformation, as
they did all through the U.S. election. Russia’s
adversary during the U.S. presidential
election was not Hillary Clinton but faith in
the American electoral process.
Kremlin propaganda outfits like RT and
Sputnik aggressively push a mix of news and
conjecture whose aim is not to convince
viewers that a particular narrative is true
but rather that they live in a world where
disinterested, objective fact does not, indeed
cannot exist. Their stories are disseminated
further by right-wing populists around
Europe. The Kremlin has funded far-right
parties’ growth across Europe, just as the
Soviet Union funded far-left ones in the Cold
War. But this time, the aim is not to create a
new, socialist world order, but to destroy the
possibility of any stable global order at all.
And the internet is key to that. As the
internet’s democratization of speech cuts
across traditional channels, more people’s
views can be heard. But in a deluged ideas
market, the law of supply and demand
applies. Each view is worth less, and our
ability to reflect and discriminate between
them disappears. Hearing everyone’s
Cont. on pg 38
36 37
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